You may recall that my original "Reading more female SFF authors" created a bit of a stir last February. Thousands of hits, lots of Twitter crap, lots of comments here and elsewhere; all in all, your regular minor SFF internet shitstorm.

As promised, I've been doing my part to read and review more speculative fiction titles written by women. Haven't been keeping track, to be honest, but I figured I was on target for reaching my objective. And today I received this email from a reader:

Hi Pat,I know you took a lot of flak for your post about reading more female genre writers this year and I was concerned that all the petty trolls would piss you off enough that you would decide to forgo that plan. So I was quite happy to see you follow through with it! Kate Elliott, Jacqueline Carey, C.J. Cherryh (You have to read Cyteen!), Nnedi Okorafor (Will you be reading Binti now that it won a Hugo?), Kelly Link (not her best...), Naomi Novik, Charlaine Harris, and Sarah Pinborough. And I saw on Goodreads that you are now reading Julie E. Czerneda's This Gulf of Time and Stars and N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (You should have gone for The Fifth Season, by far her best book yet!). This adds up to 10 books by female sff writers and means that you have already reached your goal before the end of September! If you read just one more book per month, you could end the year with 13 books! Maybe that's nowhere near enough for the sff feminists and the pc police, but it makes this girl pretty happy!:)You also went for a good variety of subgenres and styles. Epic fantasy, urban fantasy, space opera, magical realism, science fiction, etc, which is always nice. And you gave some of these books high marks indeed, so I'm hoping that many of your readers decided to check them out.I just wanted to thank you for putting your money where your mouth is and going through with your plan of offering increased coverage of sff books written by female authors. The silent majority of people coming to your blog couldn't care less about what supposed feminist trolls think of you and your reviews. We keep returning because we know what to expect and we like that. But as a woman who loves a great many sff female writers, it's nice to see more of them reviewed on your site.Keep up the good work,Amy
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Ah well, this made my day! =)

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commentaires:

There should be no difference between male and female writers as long as the books are good. And if new talents can be found while exploring the sf feminine writers, keep reading some. My last discovery was the awesome trilogy by Ann Leckie Ancillary trilogy.

Hard for the SFF feminist clique and the PC Police to talk shit about me. I'm ahead of schedule as far as my objective is concerned, which is good because it means that I'll read and review even more books written by female authors. And even though I'm not reviewing the kind of novels they would like me to review, they can't possibly complain about my reading and reviewing quality works by talented writers like Cherryh, Elliott, Okorafor, Carey, Link, etc.

They still hate me, that goes without saying. But they can't really shit on me regarding this. Which probably makes them hate me even more. . . ;-)